


here in your arms

by seventhstar



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: 4 + 1 format, Couch Cuddles, Fluffy., M/M, yuuma is the cutest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 05:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3717205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>four times yuuma cuddled ryoga, and one time ryoga cuddled yuuma (badly).</p>
            </blockquote>





	here in your arms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galaxyeyedrops](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxyeyedrops/gifts).



1.

Long after the movie is over and Yuuma is snoring beside him, Ryoga lies awake.

The room is dark, and the traffic outside is loud. There’s something going on in the hotel room next door, with music playing. The words are muffled, but it’s soft and slow. The air conditioner is buzzing loudly as it pumps cold, sickly sweet air into the room.

He wishes he could sleep, and if he could stop thinking about tomorrow’s panel on using water-type monsters, about his name in the program as a presenter, about the fact that even four years after the fact people still send him hate mail about it, he would, despite the noise and the smell and the cold. His eyes are heavy. He’s tired.

Yuuma’s face is shoved into his shoulder; his breath is warm, his sleep deep. Ryoga envies him this; Yuuma can sleep anywhere, at any time. His nightmares are less frequent -- but then, his sins are fewer.

Ryoga hasn’t told him he was worried about being a panelist. Yuuma was excited for him, and Ryoga never showed him any of the hate mail, and it seemed stupid to whine about what should have been an honor. The person running the panel had asked for him specifically, after all. That’s good.

He closes his eyes, just so he stops seeing monsters in the shadows on the ceiling. Maybe tomorrow will be fine and nothing bad will happen.

 _Maybe,_ Ryoga thinks darkly, _pigs will fly and hell will freeze over, too._

He sometimes wonders if it bothers Yuuma. That he cheated, and he’s never really apologized for it (because IV). He sometimes wonders if…

_...The room is packed. Even after the seats are all filled, people continue to crowd in and stand in the back and sit in the aisles. Ryoga drinks from the glass of water they’ve left on the table just to have something to do with his hands. It’s lukewarm and metallic tasting._

_There are three other chairs at the table, for three other panelists, but no one has come so far. It’s supposed to start in three minutes, and now security is closing the doors, and Ryoga is alone._

_Everyone is staring at him. They’re all dead silent. Dread pools in the pit of Ryoga’s stomach, ice cold, and he…_

“Shark?” Yuuma shakes him awake. “Come on, wake up…”

“What?”

Yuuma rolls over onto him and nuzzles into his neck. “Stop worrying about your panel and go to sleep,” he whines. He tucks his head under Ryoga’s chin. Within minutes, his breathing evens out again.

“Fine,” Ryoga says. He sleeps, too.

 

2.

”Ryoga! School is canceled!”

Ryoga throws a pillow at the door to signal Rio to stop yelling at him in the morning.

“Snow day!”

“Urgh,” Ryoga says in reply. He sits up enough to look through the blinds. Everything outside is covered in a thick layer of snow. The wind is blowing. It looks wet and disgusting, and Ryoga yanks the covers back up over his head. He’s going back to sleep.

Five minutes later, Yuuma shakes him awake.

“Yuuma, what?”

Yuma is wearing a hideous puffy jacket and a huge woolen scarf. He’s wearing a fluffy Rainbow Kuriboh hat. He looks like a marshmallow and there’s snow dripping off his shoulders.

“It’s a snow day!”

“I was sleeping!”

“But Shark!” Yuuma gestures wildly with his hands. “Aren't we going to play in the snow?”

Ryoga stares at him. He looks now at himself, at his shark-patterned pajamas and his nice warm blanket, and shakes his head. “No. Snow is gross.”

“But Shark!”

Ryoga hides under the blanket again, to avoid Yuuma’s huge sad eyes.

Yuuma sighs. Ryoga hears the rustling of fabric, and then feels the mattress dip under Yuuma’s weight.

“Fine,” Yuuma says. “Move over.”

He crawls under the covers -- he’s wearing a horrible holiday sweater -- and wraps around Ryoga from behind. Ryoga yelps when Yuuma touches him; his hands are freezing.

“This is boring,” Yuuma whispers. His cold nose touches the back of Ryoga’s neck.

“Shut up,” Ryoga says, but he’s smiling.

They stay there until the snow stops falling, and Yuuma’s stomach growls, and in the end Yuuma’s gaggles of friends show up and throw snowballs at Ryoga’s windows until they come outside.

3.

Yuuma develops a cold two days into their summer vacation, and he spends the next two days firmly glued to Ryoga’s side, no matter how many times Ryoga points out that he’s going to get him sick if he doesn’t stop.

“But I’m cold!”

Ryoga shoves a spoonful of Tylenol into his mouth.

“Shark!”

“Just eat your soup!”

Yuuma drinks the soup unhappily, eyeing the foot of space between him and Ryoga on the sofa. He inches closer. Ryoga inches away. Ryoga smacks a pillow down in between them.

“You’re so mean,” Yuuma says into his bowl of soup.

“Yeah.” Ryoga rolls his eyes. He throws Yuuma the afghan off the back of the couch, and Yuuma wraps himself in it. He looks like a human burrito. His eyes are a little glassy, and his hair looks like it’s wilting. Ryoga should take his temperature again soon, to make sure he’s getting enough Tylenol.

Yuuma shoves the empty bowl of soup across the coffee table, away from him, and curls up on the couch in a tiny ball. He coughs weakly. He looks pretty pathetic.

“Shark…?”

“Fine, come here, just -- just stop doing that!”

Yuuma flops into his lap and rests his head on Ryoga’s thigh. Ryoga sighs and grabs the pillow to slide under his head; Yuuma’s face is bony. He absently feels for the pulse at Yuuma’s neck. Too fast.

“I’m not doing anything. I’m sick,” Yuuma says seriously.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ryoga mutters. He tucks the blanket in over Yuuma’s shoulders. “Does your throat still hurt?”

“Little bit.” Yuuma yawns.

Ryoga realized that Yuuma is going to fall asleep on him, again, and Ryoga will be stuck sitting here for the next three hours unless he wants to wake him up early and risk _Yuuma’s face of betrayal._ His legs are going to go numb. Dinner will be late. It’s incredibly annoying.

Ryoga looks down at Yuuma, whose face is mashed against his thigh and who looks distressingly content.

 _Can’t even be mad at him,_ Ryoga thinks, and he settles back against the couch to wait.

4.

 **  
**“You know,” Ryoga says, turning the page of his novel, Sharknado: The Sharkening, “you’re going to have to go back to school eventually.” **  
**

“Mm,” Yuuma replies. His face is shoved into Ryoga’s shoulder. When he talks, Ryoga can feel his mouth move. He is wearing Ryoga’s jacket over his pajamas, and a furry Rainbow Kuriboh hat.

Ryoga is trying not to laugh at him.

“Does your sister know you skipped school?”

“Mm.” Yuuma yanks on his shirt to signal him to shut up. So, Akari doesn't know, and Yuuma is probably going to call him in the middle of night to tell him he’s been grounded, and can Ryoga come over and climb through his window?

He pets Yuuma’s head absently. The hat is softer than it looks.

“Why don’t you want to go?”

Yuuma lifts his head. “You aren’t going to school,” he says

“The others still need me,” Ryoga replies. Durbe and Mizael are on an “Earth field trip” right now. He’s already mentally resigned himself to having to put up bail money for them at some point.

He is pretty sure if he goes to school, everyone else will insist they need school, and frankly Ryoga isn’t ready to deal with that.

Yuuma lays his head on Ryoga’s shoulder again. “I don’t want to.”

“Yeah,” Ryoga says. He gets that. “But why?”

“Because.” Yuuma shrugs. “I’m tired.”

Ryoga wonders, of what? Of having the responsibility of the world on his shoulders? Of interacting with people? Of having to do things? Yuuma has dark bags under his eyes that he didn’t have before; maybe he just means he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Maybe he means all of those things. Ryoga wonders if it’s his job to be responsible and encourage Yuuma to go to school. If so, he’s failing miserably, because his first instinct is to say ‘okay’ and hug Yuuma and maybe feed him. He doesn’t have anyone to make him do things, except maybe Rio, and maybe that’s why he’s not bothered by Yuuma’s sudden delinquency.

Ryoga’s skipped plenty of classes and no one has tried to expel him yet, and he once bullied Yuuma and Yuuma responded by trying to rescue him, so maybe his experiences are a bad model of how things are supposed to work.

He turns his attention back to his book. Dr. Finley is loading up his shotgun to fight the Sharktopus; he’s the protagonist, but Ryoga really wants the Sharktopus to win.

“Do you think it’s over?”

Ryoga pauses. He understands what ‘it’ is. “Maybe?”

“What if it’s not?”

Ryoga pats his head again. “I’ll take care of it, okay?”

“Okay.” Yuuma leans heavily against him. “...hey, do you have any food?”

5.

“Ryoga, stop hogging the bathroom!” Alit yells.

Ryoga ignores him. His comb is stuck in his hair, and it’s not coming out, and Ryoga is trying to avoid ripping his hair out at the roots and showing up for his first date with Yuuma with a bloody baldy spot.

He finally manages to get the comb out, but now he looks ridiculous, and there’s toothpaste on his shirt, and he can hear Yuuma’s voice from the living room.

“Is Shark ready?”

“Still in the bathroom primping,” Mizael says. Ryoga is going to kill him, later.

“Are those cookies?” Yuuma asks.

That should buy him a few more minutes. Ryoga wipes off his shirt and ties his hair into a hideous fluffy ponytail and tells himself he doesn’t care three times. He takes a deep breath. It’s just a date. Ryoga was once (twice) (three times) dead. He can do this.

“I hate everything,” he tells his reflection.

Then he leaves the bathroom. All of the Barians are sitting in the living room, eating cookies, drinking chocolate milk, and grinning smugly at him, because they are assholes.

Yuuma, at least, is obvious to all that. “Shark!”

“Yuuma. Let’s go.” Ryoga grabs his keys and the spare helmet. Yuuma shrugs, stuffs the last cookie in his mouth, and follows.

The entire time they are walking down the stairs and through the underground parking lot, Ryoga is trying and failing to hold Yuuma’s hand. It’s right there, maybe a foot away, and Yuuma keeps looking at him out of the corner of his eye so he’s obviously expecting it, and Ryoga’s fingers are twitching but he can’t do it.

He tosses Yuuma the helmet. “Here we go.”

Yuuma doesn’t put it on. “Yeah…”

He looks disappointed. That face should be illegal, he thinks, and he drops his helmet and keys back onto the front seat of the bike.

He reaches out and puts his hands on Yuuma’s shoulders. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Yuuma says.

“Listen,” Ryoga begins, to explain that he does like Yuuma, he’s just...kind of fucked up. Nothing comes out of his mouth. He suspects he looks like a fish.

So he crushes Yuuma in a hug instead, and buries his face in Yuuma’s hair, and rumples that back of Yuuma’s shirt in his grip. Yuuma’s warm. He holds Ryoga back.

When Ryoga jerks away, his face is burning, but he pretends he still has his dignity.

“We’re gonna miss the movie,” he says, and he wonders if he’s smooth enough to hold hands with Yuuma in the theater. _Probably not,_ he thinks, but he starts up the bike.


End file.
